Language Myths and the History of English

by Watts, Richard J.

• ISBN13: 9780195327618
• ISBN10: 0195327616
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-02-09
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Aristotle is known as a philosopher and as a theorist of poetry, but he was also a composer of songs and verse. This is the first comprehensive study of Aristotle's poetic activity, interpreting his remaining fragments in relation to the earlier poetic tradition and to the literary culture of his time. Its centerpiece is a study of the single complete ode to survive, a song commemorating Hermias of Atarneus, Aristotle's father-in-law and patron in the 340's BCE. This remarkable text is said to have embroiled the philosopher in charges of impiety and so is studied both from a literary perspective and in its political and religious contexts. Aristotle's literary antecedents are studied with an unprecedented fullness that considers the entire range of Greek poetic forms, including poems by Sappho, Pindar, and Sophocles, and prose texts as well. Apart from its interest as a complex and subtle poem, the Song for Hermias is noteworthy as one of the first Greek lyrics for which we have substantial and early evidence for how and where it was composed, performed, and received. It thus affords an opportunity to reconstruct how Greek lyric texts functioned as performance pieces and how they circulated and were preserved. The book argues that Greek lyric poems profit from being read as scripts for performances that both shaped and were shaped by the social occasions in which they were performed. The result is a thorough and wide-ranging study of a complex and fascinating literary document that gives a fuller view of literature in the late classical age.

Author Biography

Richard J. Watts is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bern.

Table of Contents

Metaphors, myths, ideologies and archives	p. 3
Defining myths	p. 3
Conceptual metaphors and myths	p. 7
Language myths and conceptual metaphors	p. 10
Foucault's understanding of discourse	p. 16
Discourse archives	p. 18
Myths are the ôstuff that ideologies are made onö	p. 21
The structure of the book	p. 23
Establishing a linguistic pedigree	p. 28
The fire at Ashburnham House	p. 28
The myth of the longevity of English	p. 30
Tracing the growth of interest in the Beowulf manuscript	p. 34
The dating of Beowulf	p. 39
Kiernan's arguments	p. 42
Sociolinguistic arguments in favour of a Danelaw provenance for Beowulf	p. 47
Switching discourse archives	p. 50
Breaking the unbroken tradition	p. 53
Linking two myths	p. 53
Metapragmatic and metadiscursive linguistic expressions and their significance in inscribed orality	p. 56
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and the archive they instantiated	p. 59
The breakdown of the archive and inscribed orality	p. 69
The disappearance of the ASC: The end of a discourse archive	p. 79
The construction of a modern myth: Middle English as a creole	p. 83
The creolisation hypothesis	p. 83
The discussion thread ôIs English a creole?ö	p. 86
The ôMiddle English is a creoleö debate in the academic literature	p. 88
All language is language in contact	p. 96
Simplification processes not resulting in a creole	p. 100
Creolisation or no creolisation?	p. 111
Barbarians and others	p. 114
The nation-state and the notion of Kultursprache	p. 114
Language versus a language versus the language	p. 117
The ôotherö chronicle tradition	p. 121
Myths in the Polychronicon	p. 122
Linking up and extending the myths	p. 129
The central nexus of language myths	p. 136
The myth of ôgreatnessö	p. 139
Introduction	p. 139
Dating the GVS	p. 141
A reappraisal of research work on an elusive phenomenon	p. 143
GVS disputes	p. 148
Challenging the GVS	p. 149
Sociolinguistic aspects of the GVS	p. 153
The myth of greatness reconsidered	p. 155
Reinterpreting Swift's A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue: Challenging an embryonic modern myth	p. 157
Potential new myths	p. 157
The ôideology of the standard languageö and the complaint tradition	p. 158
Swift's Proposal as the beginning of a complaint tradition	p. 160
Contextualising the Proposal sociohistorically	p. 172
Alternative readings of Swift's Proposal	p. 179
Swift and after	p. 182
Polishing the myths: The commercial side of politeness	p. 183
The obsession with politeness	p. 183
The origins of eighteenth-century politeness	p. 186
The honnête homme and Descartes' physiological metaphor	p. 189
Gentrifying philosophy	p. 191
Commercialising the myth of the polite language	p. 196
Postscript	p. 206
Challenging the hegemony of standard English	p. 209
ôPolite Englishö and social stratification at the end of the eighteenth century	p. 209
Radicals, revolutionaries and language	p. 211
Language and working-class movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century	p. 219
William Hone, Peterloo and the Chartist movement	p. 223
From the legitimate language to the standard language	p. 232
Transforming a myth to save an archive: When polite becomes educated	p. 235
From homo socialis to homo culturalis	p. 235
Language and politeness, language and ôeducatednessö	p. 237
Comprehensive schools and the teaching of standard English	p. 240
Planning the reintroduction of grammar into the National Curriculum	p. 243
John Honey and the notion of educatedness	p. 248
What is standard English?	p. 254
Commodifying English and constructing a new myth	p. 259
The emergence of a modern myth	p. 259
English-ôthe language of the worldö?	p. 261
The commodification of English	p. 265
The price of English in Switzerland	p. 268
Problems in the assumption that English is the global language	p. 280
Myths, ideologies of English and the funnel view of the history of English	p. 287
From conceptual metaphors to discourse archives: The function of the myth	p. 287
The funnel view of the history of English	p. 290
Myths as stories	p. 294
Establishing the ôsuperiorityö of English	p. 298
Linguistic homogeneity versus linguistic heterogeneity	p. 300
References	p. 305
Index	p. 323
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